Every year on February 11th - Thomas Edison’s birthday - National Inventors’ Day is celebrated by remembering the inventors of the past, the creators in the present, and the builders of the future. Santa Clara County has long been an incubator for creativity and invention, a reputation that lives on in Silicon Valley. Los Gatos is a key part of that innovative spirit, and has been home to some key inventors and ideas in its history.
One such inventor is John Bean, the founder and then owner of the Bean Spray Pump Company. In the early decades of his career, John Bean and his family lived in Michigan, and later Ohio, where he received a variety of patents, including patents for a grain grinder, a straw cutter, and a type of wheelbarrow. Then, in 1883, Bean moved to Los Gatos for his health, and bought a 10-acre almond orchard to keep himself busy. Unfortunately, his orchard was infected with San Jose scale, a pest-borne disease that was sweeping through the valley at that time. The hand-operated pesticide sprayers of the time were ineffective against the pest, so John Bean invented his own continuous flow pump, which allowed the pesticide treatment to successfully reach the treetops. Bean’s spray pump was an instant hit among his fellow orchardists, and thus, the Bean Spray Pump Company was born in 1884. The museum’s permanent collection has a later model of one of Bean’s spray pumps, called a Magic Pump, which dates to around 1916; it is currently on view in our History Hall exhibition The Los Gatos History Project: Uncovering Untold Stories.
John Bean.
Zephyr Macabee. Courtesy of the Joyce Macabee Ridgely Collection at the Los Gatos Library.
Another such inventor is Zephyr A. Macabee, the founder and owner of the Macabee Gopher Trap Company. Zephyr Macabee was a barber by trade for ten years, but when his health started to fail him, he began working outdoors at a cousin’s ranch. It was through this work that he was introduced to another one of the main threats to the Valley’s valuable young orchards - the pocket gopher. So Macabee invented a simple, but incredibly effective, wire trap, which he produced and manufactured in the cellar of his house at 110 Loma Alta Avenue, and sold throughout the Santa Clara Valley out of the back of his wagon. The Macabee Gopher Trap remains almost unchanged in design to this day, and is still considered one of the most effective ways to handle a gopher problem.
-Alexandra Schindler, Collections Registrar
Macabee Gopher Trap
Magic Pump. NUMU collection, NU 2021.178.
